Introduction -- -- Part I. Travelling Image Formulas -- Chapter 1. Facing Defacement. Degas' Portraits of Women -- Chapter 2. Naked Touch. Disfiguration, Recognition and the Female Nude -- Chapter 3. Leaving an Imprint. Francesca Woodman's Photographic tableaux vivants -- Chapter 4. Pop Cinema. Hollywood's Critical Engagement with America's Culture of Consumption -- Chapter 5. Hitler Goes Pop. Totalitarianism, Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Hollywood Entertainment -- Chapter 6. Simulations of the Real. Paul McCarthy's Performance Disasters -- Chapter 7. Wagner's Isolde in Hollywood -- Chapter 8. Shakespeare's Wire -- Chapter 9. Queen of Chess. On Serial Reading -- -- Part II: Gendering the Uncanny, Imaging Death -- Chapter 10. The Horror of the Familiar. Freud's Thoughts on Femininity and the Uncanny -- Chapter 11. Gendering Curiosity. The Double Games of Siri Hustvedt, Paul Auster and Sophie Calle -- Chapter 12. The Other Self of the Imagination: Cindy Sherman's Hysterical Performance -- Chapter 13. Eva Hesse's Spectral Bride and her Uncanny Double -- Chapter 14. Wounds of Wonder. Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Nabuyoshi Araki -- Chapter 15. The Fragility of the Quotidien. Eija-Liisa Ahtila's Work with Death -- Chapter 16. Picasso's War Women -- Chapter 17. Contending with the Father. Louise Bourgeois and her Aesthetics of Reparation -- -- Notes -- Index

The influential cultural critic Elisabeth Bronfen sets out in this book a conversation between literature, cinema, and visual culture. The crossmappings in and between these essays address the cultural survival of image formulas involving portraiture and the uncanny relation between the body and its representability, the gendering of war, death and the fragility of life, as well as sovereignty and political power. Each chapter tracks transformations that occur as aesthetic figurations travel not only from one historical moment to the next, but also from one medium to another. Following Bronfen on these journeys into the cultural imaginary, the reader encounters prominent artists such as Edgar Degas, Francesca Woodman, Paul McCarthy, Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Richard Wagner, Pablo Picasso and William Shakespeare, alongside Classical Hollywood's film noir and melodrama, and the TV series The Wire and House of Cards.